1. Field of the Invention
This invention relates to systems and methods for calendaring daily events and recording important information, and specifically relates to a system particularly structured to facilitate the access and use of such information and calendaring of events.
2. Description of Related Art
All typical "day planners" or appointment calendaring systems function in virtually an identical manner. That is, each two page spread, comprising left- and right-facing pages, contains one page which bears an area of pre-printed lines corresponding to hourly values (i.e. 8:00, 9:00, 10:00, etc.) and an opposing page which provides an area for noting different activities such as phone calls, tasks or things to-do, reservations, confirmations, records of events, expenses, notes and other information. This pattern or form layout is repeated for each day of the week or month and a monthly calender page typically divides the various months.
This conventional format creates several operational or functional problems. For example, because most "day planners" are structured to provide the ability to schedule and annotate the activities of a single day, and given the fact that there are 28-31 days in any given month, there is a tremendous amount of paper that comprises a single year of a day planner. As a result, most day planners, particularly those that are maintained in a spiral or three-ring binder form, can only be kept in increments or portions of the year, such as three or four months at a time. The amount of paper required to provide a daily planner also has the incidental disadvantage of limiting the space available in any day for making appointments or for annotating daily events or activities. That is, each day's page typically has only enough space for the appointments of that day, and should the user need to check his schedule for several days in advance, he must flip or turn from page to page and simultaneously try to retain each day's schedule in his memory.
Additionally, the conventional time slots (i.e., 9:00, 10:00, etc.) usually give disproportionate space to early morning or late night appointments and, thus, is not an accurate reflection of the time recorded or available in a given day. Each time slot entry must be reviewed carefully to assess available times during the day or evening. The right side page of most day planners provides but a single location for noting all information. Such annotated information usually encompasses a variety of different matters, including activities, reminders of things to-do and records. This mixing of unrelated information necessitated by the structural layout of typical day planners requires the user to employ complicated codes to label or separately identify these items. Because of the repeating nature of each page, any information or annotated activities that need to be addressed or completed on a following day must be rewritten onto the page of each subsequent day that the task remains unfinished. This constitutes nothing more than dated scratch paper.
The calender page or pages of typical planners never provide enough writing space on the needed day without overwriting the adjacent dates. Additionally, the shear mass of paper required to print typical planners in this format makes it impractical if not impossible to carry a full year of the planner at one time. That means that pages must be removed, stored and replaced periodically throughout the year.
Thus, it would be advantageous in the art to provide a planner device which is structured to provide flexible scheduling capabilities coupled with the structural means for facilitating access to information on any given day of a week, or subsequent weeks, and which reduces the amount of paper conventionally required to provide calendaring capabilities.